Category design involves creating a new product, service, or marketing category that would resolve existing or new consumer problems. It’s a business strategy of dominating a new niche or market and solely benefiting from it, which encourages others to start replicating it, making your business or brand the pioneer of such a unique product or service. In this article, you’ll learn the top category design tips you can implement in your business.
1. Understand Your Audience Better
In traditional marketing, businesses are learning from or following the footsteps of popular and existing brands. However, being a follower means not being able to maximize marketing benefits as many businesses are already using the same product, service, or marketing strategy.
With category design, you need to understand your audience better and provide them with innovative solutions or a marketing tactic solely designed by you. By doing so, you’ll not only keep your loyal customers but attract more potential ones as well.
Here are some ways to get to know your audience better:
- Through A Survey: Conduct a survey and ask your existing customers what they love about your product, service, or marketing strategy.
- Check Your Analytics: Review the data of your marketing automation software. You probably wouldn’t just see the opportunities for a new category design. So, look closely at the results to determine your strengths and weaknesses.
- Brainstorm With Your Team: You might be surprised about the fresh ideas of your team, so make sure to brainstorm with your team to get their insights and suggestions instead of thinking about your new category design on your own.
2. Take Advantage Of Prototyping
Prototyping pertains to creating miniature sizes of the actual desired product to launch in the market, which is highly recommended before finalizing your category design. It’s commonly used in designing physical projects wherein large manufacturing or system building construction is involved. With 3D printing, prototyping is comparatively speedy and won’t slow down your category design project that much.
Here are the advantages of prototyping for category design:
- Prototyping greatly improves the quality of the requirements and specifications provided to customers.
- Improve and increase user involvement with prototyping, enabling them to see and interact with your project’s working model. Customers can provide immediate feedback, alter model specifications, and request project changes.
- Prototyping helps eliminate miscommunications and misunderstandings during the category design process.
3. Use A Project Management Solution
A project management tool should be flexible and fun to use in organizing plans, projects, and a new category design. Choosing one that can handle multiple languages and can be accessed anywhere even if you’re offline is a great way to focus on creating a new marketing strategy and get the most out of your team’s talents.
Project management tools include benefits and features for collaborations, integrations, task management, mobile app capabilities, and audience segmentation. They’re very effective with managing projects small businesses usually do. With a project management tool, you can integrate or add features to convert each board into “living applications”, and you can integrate hundreds of apps to choose from.
Here’s how a project management tool can help with your category design:
- Organization: You can create structures to organize content by labeling them, saving you time and money in the long run. With a reliable project management tool, you can easily tag, categorize, and find your suppliers, expenses, and income. You can prepare payroll and file taxes with ease.
- Scan And Save Receipts, Business Cards, And Bills: You can integrate a camera on mobile devices to scan receipts, business cards, and bills. After this, you can shred the paper to keep your workspace clutter-free.
- Snap Photos Of Serial Numbers And Equipment: Protect your assets by snapping photos of your equipment. For instance, if you have a coffee shop, you can take photos of your coffee roaster and espresso with their respective serial numbers. Recall the size, brand, and flavor of ingredients or supplies by taking photos of stockable items. Snap photos of flyers and menu boards to spark bright ideas for your next marketing campaign.
4. Take Advantage Of Digital Marketing
Once you have a new product, service, or marketing strategy, you can tie it up with a good combination of digital marketing strategies for a more powerful impact.
Check out some of the most popular digital or online marketing strategies:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Affiliate marketing
- Paid ads like pay-per-click or PPC
Conclusion
Category design starts with understanding your intended audience by conducting a survey and not neglecting their complaints and unpleasant comments or feedback. With the help of prototyping and project management tools, you can achieve short-term and long-term goals for your category design to make your business thrive and be more competitive.
